ABSTRACT
Ibn Omar tweets: ‘Roads from #tripoli to #azZawiya are filled with military and tanks, the west of the city (sourman area) is under control by Khweldi’.
(BBC liveblog on Libya, 26 February 2011)
Citizen voice is today a crucial part of contemporary war and conflict reporting. As this quote from the Libya conflict demonstrates, the power of citizen voice stems from its capacity to witness conflict from the perspective of civilians and, potentially, to raise the demand for responsibility or even action in their name. Whilst civilian testimony has been part of the repertoire of war reporting since the First World War (Goode 2009), the new visibility of citizen voice fully resonates with the contemporary ethos of ‘humanitarian’ wars, which now places this voice at the heart of the United Nations (UN) doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P): ‘the responsibility to protect implies an evaluation of the issues from the point of view of those seeking or needing support, rather than those who may be considering intervention’ (emphasis added).1 The moral emphasis on listening to ‘those seeking or needing support’ marks, from this perspective, an emerging ‘institutionalisation of empathy and altruism’ in the management of contemporary conflicts – a process inherently linked to the historical shift from traditional warfare, based on a conception of ‘sovereignty as control’ over territories or groups, towards wars that today rely on ‘sovereignty as responsibility for human rights and individual security’ (Marlier and Crawford 2013: 406).
